This volume offers insights on experimental and empirical research in theoretical linguistic issues of negation and polarity, focusing on how negation is marked and how negative polarity is emphatic and how it interacts with double negation. Metalinguistic negation and neg-raising are also explored in the volume. Leading specialists in the field present novel ideas by employing various experimental methods in felicity judgments, eye tracking, self-paced readings, prosody and ERP. Particular attention is given to extensive crosslinguistc data from French, Catalan and Korean along with analyses using semantic and pragmatic methods, corpus linguistics, diachronic perspectives and longitudinal acquisitional studies as well as signed and gestural negation. Each contribution is situated with regards to major previous studies, thereby offering readers insights on the current state of the art in research on negation and negative polarity, highlighting how theory and data together contributes to the understanding of cognition and mind.

Perspectives on Negation and Polarity Items contains a selection of papers on the semantics, acquisition and licensing behavior of negation. Negation, being one of the prevalent features of any human language, has many facets of interest to linguists, psychologists and philosophers alike. In recent years, much attention has been paid to the complicated distributional patterns of polarity items. Many of the contributions in this volume are devoted to the study of one or more of these items in langages such as English (Laurence Horn, Anita Mittwoch, Chris Kennedy), Dutch (Jack Hoeksema and Hotze Rullmann, Henny Klein, Gertjan Postma), German (Gabriel Falkenberg), Hindi (Utpal Lahiri) and Greek (Anastasia Giannakidou). In addition, some general issues surrounding negation are addressed, such as the characterization of the notion “strength of negation” (Jay Atlas), the problem of NEG-raising (Lucia Tovena), the interaction of negation and modality (Johan van der Auwera) and the acquisition of negation (Kenneth Drozd).

This books studies syntax of NPIs and their interaction with sentential negatives in Hindi. It outlines the clause structure of Hindi and locates the syntactic position of sentential negatives as well as constituent negatives within the structure. It is argued that sentential negative in Hindi negation marker heads its own maximal projection, NegP, which is immediately dominated by TP. In addition to locating the position of negation markers in the clause structure, it outlines the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) in Hindi and the structural constraints on their licensing by sentential negative. The book argues that an NPI in Hindi is licensed overtly in the course of derivation by a c-commanding negative marker. The bulk of the evidence presented in this book argues against previous theoretical accounts that claim that NPI licensing involves covert syntactic operations such as LF movement or reconstruction. With respect to the classification of NPIs , this book also shows the existence of two different types of NPIs in Hindi; namely, strong NPIs and weak NPIs. Strong NPIs require a clause mate c-commanding negative licensor, whereas weak NPIs are quantifiers and are similar to free choice 'any' in English that are interpreted as NPIs in the presence of a c-commanding negative licensor.

Negation is a central feature of language and cognition, interacting with all areas of grammar as well as with the philosophy of language. Whereas there is a cross-linguistic uniformity in logical and semantic aspects of negation, there is a diversity of syntactic and morphological forms and rules. This asymmetry in function and form poses problems for syntactic and universal grammar theory and for the study of the interface between syntax and discourse. It is particularly evident in negative polarity–words and phrases which can appear only in negative sentences. The exploration of negation and negative polarity phenomena and their implications for linguistic theory are the main themes of this book.

Demonstrates sentential negation within a Government and Binding framework, showing parallelism between negative and interrogative sentences.

Polarity phenomena have been known to linguists since Klima's seminal work on English negation. In this monograph Giannakidou presents a novel theory of polarity which avoids the empirical and conceptual problems of previous approaches by introducing a notion wider than negation and downward entailment: (non)veridicality. The leading idea is that the various polarity phenomena observed in language are manifestations of the dependency of certain expessions, i.e. polarity items, to the (non)veridicality of the context of appearence. Dependencies to negation or downward entailment emerge as subcases of nonveridicality.The (non)veridical dependency may be positive (licensing), or negative (anti-licensing), and arises from the sensitivity semantics of polarity items. The book is also concerned with the syntactic mapping of the sensitivity dependency. It is argued that licensing does not necessarily correspond to a requirement that the licensee be in the scope of the licenser. In some cases, for instance for the interpretation of negative concord, the reverse is required: that the licensee takes the licenser in its scope. The theory is applied to an extended set of old and new data concerning affective, free-choice dependencies, and mood choice in relative clauses. The primary focus is on Greek, but data from Dutch, English, and to a lesser extend Romance and Slavic, are also considered.

In the last decade, there has been a revival of interest regarding negation and polarity, with much cross-fertilization between semantic and syntactic approaches. The papers in the present volume address key issues regarding the syntax and semantics of negation and polarity, including both synchronic and diachronic perpectives. Central to the discussions are the distribution of negative markers and the structure of the clause, negative concord phenomena, licensing of polarity items, similarities between Neg-movement and wh-movement. The papers, by main contributors to the field, reflect different theoretical frameworks, including Principles and Parameters and Minimalist approaches, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Formal Semantics, or approaches interested in pragmatics. The volume is of interest to syntacticians, semanticians, historical linguists, typologists, and philosophers.